Staff ML Engineer, Frontier AI

About Us:

Here at Ambience, we never set out to be just another scribe. We're building the AI intelligence platform that restores humanity to healthcare and drives meaningful ROI for health systems across the country.

Our technology helps providers focus on delivering great care by removing the administrative burden that pulls them away from patients and away from their most impactful work. Ambience delivers real-time coding-aware documentation and clinical workflow support across ambulatory, emergency and inpatient settings at the top health systems in North America.

Our teams operate relentlessly with extreme ownership to build the best solutions for our health system partners. We value candor, positivity and deep thought - and we expect a lot from each other because we know the problems we're solving truly matter.

Ambience was ranked #1 for Improving the Clinician Experience in the KLAS Research Emerging Solutions Top 20 Report, recognized by Fast Company as one of the Next Big Things in Tech, named one of the best AI companies in healthcare by Inc., and selected as a LinkedIn Top Startup in 2024 and 2025. We're backed by Oak HC/FT, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), OpenAI Startup Fund, and Kleiner Perkins - and we're just getting started.

The Role:

As a Staff ML Engineer on the Frontier AI team at Ambience, you'll own the hardest model quality problems across our clinical AI products - foundational coding models, adaptive scribing, voice agents, long-context chart understanding, and clinical reasoning. This isn't a platform or infrastructure role. You'll set research direction, design learning loops, and drive end-to-end model quality improvements that compound over time.

Ambience ships advanced clinical AI in real-world healthcare settings. The models that power our products operate under constraints you won't find in typical ML roles - proprietary ontologies, messy EHR data, high compliance stakes, and clinician workflows where latency and accuracy both matter. You'll bring deep research instincts and engineering discipline to push the frontier on all of it.

Our engineering roles are hybrid - working onsite at our San Francisco office three days per week.

What You'll Own:

• Own foundational model research. Identify failure modes, form hypotheses, and drive architecture decisions on hard clinical AI problems - medical coding, adaptive scribing, chart understanding, and more.
• Build compounding learning loops. Design systems that turn real-world signals - clinician edits, coder corrections, audit outcomes - into fast, safe model improvements.
• Improve Chart Chat quality. Drive better grounding, smarter retrieval, and reasoning that holds up under the real diversity of clinical questions over complex longitudinal patient records.
• Push latency, accuracy, and cost simultaneously. Apply the right optimization levers - capability routing, distillation, speculative decoding, quantization - and know when each is safe.
• Contribute to population-level clinical reasoning. Help build toward a layer of clinical intelligence that reasons not just over individual patients, but across patient populations at scale.
• Stay at the cutting edge. Distill insights from recent research - particularly in RL, deep learning, and clinical NLP - and drive experiments that keep Ambience at the frontier of clinical AI.

Who You Are:

• Deep RL and Deep Learning Expertise
  
  • 5+ years of ML engineering or applied research experience, with a strong track record of shipping model improvements in production.
  • Deep expertise in reinforcement learning and deep learning, developed in industry or a research setting.
  • Publications at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, etc.) are a strong plus.
• Research to Production
  
  • Comfortable spanning research and engineering - architecture decisions, training runs, fine-tuning pipelines, and production deployment.
  • Experience with preference learning, RLHF, retrieval-augmented generation, or multi-label classification.
  • Strong Python fundamentals and experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch preferred).
• End-to-End Ownership
  
  • Can point to model quality improvements driven end to end: from identifying a failure mode to shipping and measuring a fix.
  • Has operated at the frontier of a hard problem, not just applied standard techniques.
  • Staff-level scope - has owned research directions and influenced technical decisions across teams.
• Mission-Aligned
  
  • Passion for healthcare or other high-stakes, mission-driven industries.
  • Thrives in a fast-paced environment; takes extreme ownership of deliverables.
• Nice-to-haves
  
  • Experience with clinical data: EHR systems, FHIR, medical coding ontologies, or clinical NLP.
  • Prior work in healthcare AI or other regulated, high-stakes domains.
  • Open-source contributions to ML libraries, benchmarks, or evaluation frameworks.

Why Here:

Our products power specialty-specific note generation, chart-aware diagnosis prediction, and real-time clinical decision support in real clinical settings. The work is deeply technical, but the goal is simple: help clinicians do great work with less friction.
To keep improving, we can't wait around for bigger models. The fastest path is building intelligence that gets better with every encounter - learning from how clinicians actually use the products, what they change, and what outcomes follow.
You will own the hardest model quality problems across our clinical AI suite: coding models that navigate a proprietary million-term ontology with multi-objective precision, a scribe that learns from edit signals without introducing regressions, long-context chart understanding that stays faithful under real clinical complexity, and population-level reasoning that surfaces patterns across patients in a way that's auditable and actionable.
This is not applied ML on clean benchmarks - it's research-grade model work with production stakes, where your improvements directly shape what clinicians experience every day.

Compensation
We offer a base compensation range of approximately $250,000-350,000 per year, exclusive of equity. This intentionally broad range provides flexibility for candidates to tailor their cash and equity mix based on individual preferences. Our compensation philosophy prioritizes meaningful equity grants, enabling team members to share directly in the impact they help create.

Are you outside of the range? We encourage you to still apply: we take an individualized approach to ensure that compensation accounts for all of the life factors that matter for each candidate.

Life at Ambience

Working at Ambience means opting into a high-ownership, high-trust environment built for people who want to grow fast, operate decisively and focus on work that matters. This could be the right place for you if you want to

• Work on mission-critical AI technology that directly improves clinicians' day-to-day lives and health system financial health across some of the most complex, high-stakes workflows in the world.
• Join a "dream team" culture where we hire exceptional people, expect exceptional outcomes and invest deeply in feedback and continuous growth. We operate as a championship team, and that means being ok with hard, uncomfortable, ambiguous problems that lead to real greatness.
• Operate with real ownership and accountability in an environment where there are no bystanders: If something is broken, we fix it! You will have meaningful autonomy and be expected to drive work to completion.

To help you do your best work, we pair these expectations with benefits intentionally designed to help you feel supported and safe at Ambience and beyond. Some of our key benefits include

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• 401(k) with a company match of up to 3% of base salary
• A remote-friendly culture (with a San Francisco HQ) and full equipment provisioning to ensure you can work effectively from wherever you're based.
• Parental leave to support your family needs
• Annual company-wide off-sites, team off-sites and regular team lunches and all-hands gatherings, with travel, lodging and meals covered
• Flexible time off with no annual cap, company-wide holidays and an annual holiday shutdown from December 24-January 1 designed to support real rest and long-term sustainability.

Ambience Healthcare is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status. We encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply.

Ambience is committed to supporting every candidate's ability to fully participate in our hiring process. If you need any accommodations during your application or interviews, please reach out to our Recruiting team at View email address on click.appcast.io . We'll handle your request confidentially and work with you to ensure an accessible and equitable experience for all candidates.

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